This is the story of Yoga in America, as told by 46 ardent teachers and devotees from every part of the Yoga spectrum. 46 unique and compelling essays on what Yoga is in America representing the major yoga traditions, Bikram, Kundalini, Ashtanga, Kripalu, Iyengar and some that are much less widely known. The 46 writers assembled in this book show both the great diversity of Yoga and its unifying principles. So dive in to any page and you will find a story or musing that offers you wisdom, profound inspiration, and perhaps even a touch of enlightenment. Here is a sample of some of the fascinating and fun chapter titles: "Hot Yoga in America-Roots and Offshoots" "Skip the Middle Man and Go Directly to Bliss " "How Yoga Saved My Life" "Firm Buttocks or Self-Realization?" "How Patanjali Comes Alive in My Classes and My Life" Proceeds from Yoga in America support Families of Fallen Firefighters.

Originally from Riga, Latvia, Yoga practitioner, author and teacher Indra Devi (born Eugenie Peterson) lived to 102 years! She became fascinated with India at age 15 and set out to India in 1927 to become a disciple of Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, after which time she moved to different parts of the world and taught Yoga. She comes from the renowned tradition of Mysore. For thousands of years the culture of Yoga has existed in India, bringing to its practitioners remarkable health and spiritual well-being. In YOGA FOR AMERICANS Indra Devi has brought this ancient art to those who need it most: Americans, victims of a driving, competitive, tension-ridden society which suffers from its own superabundance. Here, in the richest country in the world, an alarming number of people still die from malnutrition and allied diseases; obesity, underactivity, and psychosomatic illness are commonplace; tension-inspired heart attacks are the worst killers of all. Here is an invaluable book, packed with sound, proven advice, including many extras such as an introductory question-and-answer session, lavish illustrations, special diets, and constructive advice for those suffering from arthritis, asthma, and overweight.

In The Subtle Body, Stefanie Syman tells the surprising story of yoga's transformation from a centuries-old spiritual discipline to a multibillion-dollar American industry. Yoga's history in America is longer and richer than even its most devoted practitioners realize. It was present in Emerson's New England, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was fashionable among the leisure class. And yet when Americans first learned about yoga, what they learned was that it was a dangerous, alien practice that would corrupt body and soul. A century later, you can find yoga in gyms, malls, and even hospitals, and the arrival of a yoga studio in a neighborhood is a signal of cosmopolitanism. How did it happen? It did so, Stefanie Syman explains, through a succession of charismatic yoga teachers, who risked charges of charlatanism as they promoted yoga in America, and through generations of yoga students, who were deemed unbalanced or even insane for their efforts. The Subtle Body tells the stories of these people, including Henry David Thoreau, Pierre A. Bernard, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Isherwood, Sally Kempton, and Indra Devi. From New England, the book moves to New York City and its new suburbs between the wars, to colonial India, to postwar Los Angeles, to Haight-Ashbury in its heyday, and back to New York City post-9/11. In vivid chapters, it takes in celebrities from Gloria Swanson and George Harrison to Christy Turlington and Madonna. And it offers a fresh view of American society, showing how a seemingly arcane and foreign practice is as deeply rooted here as baseball or ballet. This epic account of yoga's rise is absorbing and often inspiring—a major contribution to our understanding of our society.

A fascinating look at India’s remarkable impact on Western culture, this eye-opening popular history shows how the ancient philosophy of Vedanta and the mind-body methods of Yoga have profoundly affected the worldview of millions of Americans and radically altered the religious landscape. What exploded in the 1960s, following the Beatles trip to India for an extended stay with their new guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, actually began more than two hundred years earlier, when the United States started importing knowledge--as well as tangy spices and colorful fabrics--from Asia. The first translations of Hindu texts found their way into the libraries of John Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson. From there the ideas spread to Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and succeeding generations of receptive Americans, who absorbed India’s “science of consciousness” and wove it into the fabric of their lives. Charismatic teachers like Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda came west in waves, prompting leading intellectuals, artists, and scientists such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger, John Coltrane, Dean Ornish, and Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass, to adapt and disseminate what they learned from them. The impact has been enormous, enlarging our current understanding of the mind and body and dramatically changing how we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos. Goldberg paints a compelling picture of this remarkable East-to-West transmission, showing how it accelerated through the decades and eventually moved from the counterculture into our laboratories, libraries, and living rooms. Now physicians and therapists routinely recommend meditation, words like karma and mantra are part of our everyday vocabulary, and Yoga studios are as ubiquitous as Starbuckses. The insights of India’s sages permeate so much of what we think, believe, and do that they have redefined the meaning of life for millions of Americans—and continue to do so every day. Rich in detail and expansive in scope, American Veda shows how we have come to accept and live by the central teaching of Vedic wisdom: “Truth is one, the wise call it by many names.”

How We Live Our Yoga collects fourteen frank, moving, and thoughtful personal essays by passionate yoga practitioners on why they began to practice, what it has brought to their lives, how their relationship to yoga changes and evolves, and more. Judith Lasater looks at the unexpected relationship between yoga and parenting. Award-winning poet Stanley Plumly ponders the connection between his Quaker upbringing, his writing, and his yoga practice. The well-known Sanskritist Vyaas Houston tells the story of his first guru and their difficult relationship. And philosopher and conceptual artist Adrian Piper comes out as a yogic celibate.

'An indispensable companion for all interested in yoga, both scholars and practitioners' Professor Alexis G. J. S. Sanderson Despite yoga's huge global popularity, relatively little of its roots is known among practitioners. This compendium includes a wide range of texts from different schools of yoga, languages and eras: among others, key passages from the early Upanisads and the Mahabharata, and from the Tantric, Buddhist and Jaina traditions, with many pieces in scholarly translation for the first time. Covering yoga's varying definitions, its most important practices, such as posture, breath control, sensory withdrawal and meditation, as well as models of the esoteric and physical bodies, Roots of Yoga is a unique and essential source of knowledge. Translated and Edited with an Introduction by James Mallinson and Mark Singleton

Illustrated guide to hatha yoga with many poses.